Some conventional email systems use color coding to identify certain items that have a field or attribute with a particular value. This allows those items to be easily identified. For example in an email context, a name of a particular sender may be highlighted a particular color for each message sent by the particular sender (i.e. if sender is “Paul Smith” then item background color is “blue”). Typically, the color coding is applied to the particular field or attribute (i.e., the name, date, subject), rather than the entire item that includes the particular attribute.
Further, some conventional email systems use highlighting to indicate that a particular item (or items) have been selected. Typically, this “selection highlighting” results in the entire line corresponding to the item to be highlighted with a particular color. However, a problem arises with those systems that use both selection highlighting and color coding in that many times a user cannot see or distinguish between the selection highlighting and the color coding at the same time.
In order to accommodate this problem, some conventional systems that use color coding typically use an altogether different mechanism for selecting items, such as, for example, selection boxes or outlines. However, these conventional mechanisms of selecting do not distinguish the selected message as readily as selection highlighting.
What is needed is a mechanism to provide both selection highlighting and color coding in a single item.